Grade 12 students and their counterparts in colleges and universities are cognitively ready to engage fully in learning according to the Standards.  They can master at least short discourses, that is, chains of paragraphs that develop plans and predict outcomes in order to negotiate positions between themselves and others.  Such students understand and can distinguish between discourse connectors that elaborate ideas ("furthermore, in addition") and those that compare ("on the contrary, despite, but") or suggest cause and effect relationships ("because, for that reason").  They are cognitively ready to participate fully in the language behaviors of a culture; they can do work of comparison and join new communities, according to their intellectual abilities and the level of communication they can sustain in the foreign language.

     If a teacher chooses a play as part of the language curriculum, Grade 12 students can read an entire act or the play as a whole with comprehension of its significance.  They will be able to locate the content world of the text -- its sociology as a different geographical and cultural place -- and its historical setting, as those contrast with their own, more familiar historical setting in the United States in the present day (see Unit 3, Grade 12 Standards).  It will remain for the teacher to specify how more and more complex uses of the text build through the curriculum.  Thus, they can be asked to express personal ideas stimulated by the text (the communication standards), identify its subject matter (the connections standards), and read it as a filter for an alternative set of values, activities, and expectations (the culture standards).  Grade 12 students are cognitively ready to use more sophisticated language than the Grade 8 student is able to use, either in English or German.  Grade 12 students may commence with words, phrases, and sentences, or with some mix of comprehending the German text and communicating about it in English, but because of their greater cognitive and linguistic resources in their native language (as well as because of their preparation in German), they can proceed rapidly to paragraphs, and from there to the kind of connected discourse that will allow them to join new communities.

     Consequently, cognitively mature students in Grade 12 are also able to participate more fully in the comparison and communities standards than are students in Grades 4 and 8.  They possess the mental maturity to synthesize dual realities, the textual world and their own.  That synthesis is requisite if students are to compare how cultures use their institutions and language to signal power or "get things done."  Similarly, students' abilities to synthesize cognitively are essential to realize the goals of the communities standards, because in those standards, students must transpose themselves into the foreign culture and negotiate between their world and the putative world of the text.  Both the comparison and the communities standards, then, require not only sophisticated language use, but also the cognitive ability to remember and link two distinct concepts of reality.

Part 2 Introduction and Table of Contents
Unit 4 Introduction